QupZilla Browser: one web browser, three niche features

QupZilla Browser: one web browser, three niche features


Just how do you establish a niche in the browser market when it is already saturated with so many competitors? Well, you could use Webkit and QT, throw in a few neat features and see where that takes you. That's exactly what the developers at QupZilla did. So, I decided to take a look at the substance behind that quirky name.

Quipzilla does enough. Just

I won't rehash all the features you'd expect of modern browsers. Qupzilla has most of them. Let's concentrate on where QupZilla is different--and possibly better. The first feature that really caught my attention was the way the developers integrated Bookmarks, RSS feeds and History and it doesn't do any harm that it looks good too.

Figure 1: Qupzilla's tabbed and integrated RSS feederFigure 1: Qupzilla's tabbed and integrated RSS feeder

That's a definite pass, but a fail in not adding the ability to tag bookmarks for better searching and adding bookmarks as speedials. QupZilla allows you import Firefox, Chrome and Opera bookmarks as well as importing from an HTML file.

Figure 2: Qupzilla's bookmarks import optionsFigure 2: Qupzilla's bookmarks import options

QupZilla has two other features that other browsers should emulate. The first is the ability to take a screenshot of an entire web page without the need for external tools. Save Page Screen is QupZilla's name for it. Handy if you ever need to e-mail a whole page to a website admin to annotate and highlight style and formatting errors.

All browsers have a print function and Chrome(ium) has an excellent preview facility but they should imitate QupZilla's. Other than not opening in full screen (you have to manually resize it) I can't fault it.

Figure 3: Print Preview is clean and configurableFigure 3: Print Preview is clean and configurable

Finally, Speed Dial. Firefox requires an addon for that but, like Opera, QupZilla has it baked in. It's not highly configurable but you seem to be able to add an infinite number of speedials and a scroll bar will appear as he number grows so navigation is simple.

Verdict

QupZilla looks good, renders pages well and renders them fast and and has some features that just about manage to leverage a niche for it in a crowded market. The worst thing I can say about it is that it may have occasional stability issues. I had several crashes and a segmentation fault.

It's no replacement for Firefox or Chromium (yet) but it did just enough to stay on my hard drive and if you want to try it out install it via the PPA.

Category: 
End users
Tagging: 
qupzilla
browser
qt
webkit
License: 
CC-BY-SA

Author information

Gary Richmond's picture

Biography

A retired but passionate user of free and open source for nearly ten years, novice Python programmer, Ubuntu user, musical wanabee when "playing" piano and guitar. When not torturing musical instruments, rumoured to be translating Vogon poetry into Swahili.

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